Tuesday, 18 November 2008

Emulation, to emulate or not

One thing has become apparent to me whilst viewing several forums and that’s the divide between owning actual cartridges and playing game on an emulator. The main benefit of emulation is just how easy it is to pick up hundreds if not thousands of NES games the world over. A quick glance at several sites shows that a full collection of NES games comes to around 1.5GB in total which in this day and age can be practically stored on a USB memory stick.

There’s something to be said about hunting down a game, researching it, finding a cheap copy and then actually having it pop through the letterbox. It makes the whole experience seem real to me and it always means that I spend time with the actual game, sitting down to play it properly. With emulated games the urge to open several in a row diminishes the experience for me. A good example of this is Dragon Warrior 4, now I recently purchased DW 1 (coming in a future blog entry) from the US after hearing good things about the series. It turns out that the 4th game is extremely rare going for at least £60 a time on eBay and I’ve even seen a few clearing £90 with just a box and cart.

I am really tempted to play this due to it being highly recommended over on Rllmuk Forum but the price means it might be a long time off. Now I suppose I could open an emulator like NESter and play the games straightaway but then I would lose the joy of actually buying the cart, holding it in my own two hands etc which to me seems to be sacrificing a lot.

For the sake of the blog I am not trying to build a complete collection of NES games, rather take my time working through as many decent titles with a write up for each. The only time I will use emulation is if I buy a cart and it breaks or refuses to run but even then it will only be as a last resort. It’s an interesting discussion for NES collectors so I’d like to hear your thoughts.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

DW4 wasn't highly recommended, I simply said it was the best of the NES DW games. I'd steer clear of the DW games to be honest... There are much better RPGs worth your time, several of them not as expensive as DW4!

I always take recommendations! Especially for RPG's. I'm in no rush to buy the rest of the DW series because of the high prices but one series I have my eye on is the Ultima games. So I may import a few of those at some point.

Me again. Crystalis. It's more Zelda LTTP than Zelda NES, and it's very good. Sweet Home is also probably the best of the Japanese RPGs on the system (if you're going to emulate, then emulate that). But I've mentioned those two already.

Ultima isn't very good, I'd say.

Star Tropics 1 and 2 are said to be very good, though I've not played them too much.